Yonndio Thirties\" Tillie Olsen. Introduction Linda Ray

¶ … Yonndio thirties" Tillie Olsen. Introduction Linda ray Pratt. Full citation heading- author, title, place publication, publisher, date, number pages. 1- The reviewer gives a clear concise summary content book

Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio from the thirties. Bison, 2004.

Yonnondio from the thirties details the struggles of a Colorado-based mining family during the first half of the 20th century. Jim Holbrook is an alcoholic who abuses his wife Anna. They have many children, including the main protagonist of the novel, Mazie. Eventually the family moves to South Dakota where they establish a farm and briefly enjoy prosperity. However, the family still remains mired in debt, and when Anna becomes pregnant again, her marriage to Jim begins to even more rapidly dissolve. The family is forced to move to the city of Omaha. Conditions are far worse in an urban environment because of the poor health of the air, water, and closeness of tenement living. Anna takes in laundry to supplement the family income, which makes Jim angry because he does not believe his wife should work. The novel illustrates how poverty is a self-perpetuating cycle, and is very difficult to extricate one's self from, despite the notion that America is a meritocracy. The plight of women is particularly bleak: Mazie's intelligence and desire to learn is never supported. When she befriends an old man who dies and leaves his books to her, her father symbolically sells them. He also excludes her from many of the activities which he participates in with her brothers.

The novel thus highlights how poverty is a prison, but how gender roles specifically contribute to that prison. Anna's constant child-bearing keeps her tied to an unsuitable marriage, and her husband's refusal to let her work makes the family reliant upon his inconsistent salary and forces them to put up with his drunkenness. Mazie's impulse to learn is seen as not worthy: the food the books can be turned into is more important than any future knowledge or career she could gain from reading them. Mazie may be intelligent, but because of the strictures imposed upon her mother, such as constant childbearing and the difficulty of dealing with an alcoholic husband, the little girl must assume many motherly responsibilities while still a child. Anna does urge her children to seek out an education, but because she is constantly working and is not educated herself, she finds it difficult to support her words with deeds. Also, after Anna has a miscarriage she has postpartum depression and is physically weakened, which forces Mazie to take on even more household chores.

Yonnondio from the thirties is an unfinished novel, so the drama of the Holbrook family is never successfully resolved. The author, Tillie Olsen, came from a similar background than the novel's main protagonists. She was the daughter of Jewish-Russian immigrants. Like Mazie, she was often forced to assume a parental role to her younger siblings and she was of the lower working class. Olsen attended a competitive high school but was forced to drop out in 11th grade to work and support her family. A leftist radical, Olsen was extremely involved in the political struggles of the 1930s (Coiner 1995). Because of own family demands (she had her first daughter while still a teenager), the need to make a living, and her political work, Olsen was not able to devote extensive to her writings until the 1960s, during which she wrote some of the short stories that made her famous, including the much-anthologized "Tell me riddle" (Coiner 1995).

Yonnondio from thirties was written during the 1930s -- Olsen had attracted the attention of a publisher, but felt uncomfortable in literary circles, due to her acute sense that she was of the working class. "After Julie's birth…she gave up her thwarted attempts to complete Yonnondio; although she had 'fragments for another 70 pages of the novel,' she had to go to work 'typing income tax forms' (Coiner 1995). Because of its unfinished quality, Yonnondio cannot be read as a traditionally-plotted novel. Yet there is something very powerful about its unfinished quality, which gives it a true sense of being a 'slice of life.' Its fragmented quality gives it a postmodern, jarring atmosphere that is realistic in its lack of completeness and its refusal to offer the reader easy answers.